Six on Saturday: Bits and Pieces II

It has been a while since I posted a sequel to anything like I used to do so commonly. I am only doing it now because I do not have six pictures that fit a particular theme. There are not six different camellias or six different rhododendrons blooming at the same time. There is not a new landscape with six different newly installed plants to show off. Instead, I merely found a few amusing or silly pictures from work for this week. I sort of like #5 because it is interesting even to those of us who are familiar with it. I will actually elaborate a bit more on that later at noon.

I know these Six on Saturday posts do not fit with my other articles, but hey are fun for those us who participate. You can see other Six on Saturday posts by other writers at the link at the bottom of the page. You might even want to give it a try and participate yourself.

1. This might look like a signs at the Generic Aroboretum, or the Arboretum for the Horticulturally Disinterested, but the signs really refer to buildings that are named after trees. Almost all of the buildings in the neighborhood are names after flora of some sort.

2. Woodpecker pantries are often constructed in old coastal redwood trees with soft bark. It seems silly to me; but it must be effective. Otherwise, woodpeckers would not put so much effort into stocking them. Woodpeckers deposit single acorns into the holes bored into the bark, in order to store the acorns for later. Some of these holes are very old, so have stored several acorns over several years. At lest one woodpecker guards the pantry from squirrels while the other woodpeckers are out and about collecting acorns. Such pantries are typically in trees that are isolated from others, so that squirrels can not enter from other trees, and then raid the pantry from above. The only access to the squirrels is from the ground. This panty does not seem to be active at the moment, but discarded acorn shells at the base of the tree indicate the it was active in recent history.

3. Coastal redwood trees are very efficient at regenerating from stumps of harvested trees. This tan oak wanted to give it a try too. It did not really regenerate from the stump of course, but merely grew from an acorn in the detritus that collected on top of the stump, and rooted into the rotted wood. The fractures visible at the bottom of the stump are caused by expanding tan oak roots.

4. Which of these things does not belong here? Do you remember that from Sesame Street? Blue hydrangeas are not common here, although we have quite a few that are fertilized to be blue. I thought that these looked silly together because they are so similar in color.

5. Albino coastal redwoods are so fascinating. The white foliage can not survive without chlorophyll, so must remain attached to the original green tree that produced the white mutant growth. This takes a bit of explanation, so I will write a bit more about this about noon.

They do get insects. There are a few different types of woodpeckers. The most familiar and most common woodpeckers bore into deteriorating dead trees only for grubs. The woodpeckers that store the acorns also eat grubs from dead trees, but store acorns in viable trees. Other smaller woodpeckers bore into healthy trees to make them bleed sap that they woodpeckers eat.

A fun post with interesting bits of trivia! Do the woodpeckers actually find the acorns they stored, or, like squirrels, do they lose them and accidentally find the ones that fall our of the pantry? Love the artistry!

Thank you! I like posting trivia. The woodpeckers do not lose many of the acorns because they can see their entire pantry. They may leave a few leftovers for the squirrels. There are times of they years when they do not guard the pantry. They seem to load the pantry with acorns from the adjacent oaks, without going too far away to do so. Therefore, they probably find almost all of their own acorns. However, they are sometimes observed harassing squirrels to make them drop their acorns, and then swooping back and stealing them. They also watch squirrels burying theirs, and then digging them up and taking them. Yet, they protect their pantry so diligently, and leave only leftovers for the squirrels.

They are nasty! This tree is adjacent to an auditorium. After coffee and tea get put out for big events there, but before too many guests arrive, woodpeckers and other birds swoop down and take the sugar and cream, and then leave the litter strewn about!

Crows and Ravens are quite intelligent and I wonder that woodpeckers might be just as smart. I wonder too if there is some benefit to the Redwood. Nothing obvious to me but there could be some subtle effect that is Redwood helpful. D you know which woodpecker species this is? Thanks for all this, most enlightening and entertaining and I really like to read about anything Redwood. They are such majestic beings.

I do not know what species of woodpecker they are. They are loud and obnoxious, and bigger than most others. If there is an advantage to the holes getting bored into the bark, I do not know what it is. I know that squirrels benefit oaks by burying the acorns and then forgetting about them. It would not surprise me if squirrels knew that they were planting oak trees though.

They are quite rare. When I was a kid, there were supposedly only five that were documented. However, the one that I got the picture from was known about for at least a century, and is not one of the original five. There are at least three in a state park near here. So, although very rare, they are not as rare as we once thought them to be.

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